3. 3D and non-3D

Monday, April 29, 2024

1:25 a.m. I suppose we should begin at the beginning, since we are not trying to prove anything logically. Shall we start with 3D and non-3D?

It matters less where we begin than how we proceed. By explaining as best we can, relying on the reader to recognize what will ring true (rather than attempting to persuade), we gain one great advantage: Everything connecting to everything, as it does, we may begin anywhere and procced in any direction. Indeed, this is what we have always done.

It is well to begin by recognizing that many pictures of life and the world leave out much of reality. To try to describe life without remembering that half of life exists, and continues, outside the 3D is to severely distort the picture.

So we will proceed to do two things along silent parallel tracks.

  1. We will describe what can be experienced.
  2. We will sometimes say why this is so, and the reader can take this or leave it.

That is, “The world is composed of 3D elements that may be perceived by the senses, and non-3D elements that may be perceived by intuition.” This is a statement that anyone may verify by personal sensory and intuitive experience.

But then we may say as well, “The 3D world is a subset of the larger reality which – as it contains both the 3D and the non-3D elements – might be called the All-D.” This kind of statement cannot be verified, nor falsified, by personal experience. It will be assented to, or denied, according to the individual’s judgment, but it can not be experienced; it can at best seem true or untrue or doubtful.

By proceeding in this way, we can sketch an interpretation of reality that the reader may verify by experience as we go , and at the same time we can provide connecting logic that may or may not be accepted but perhaps will help connect the dots – again, as we go along.

We will not explicitly label these examples as verifiable or not; that is up to the reader, for if you do not do your part to stretch toward the meaning, little can be conveyed, and less will change within you. Life doesn’t provide something for nothing. Or, to put it positively, life rewards effort.

So let’s begin with the nature of the physical world you experience. It is 3D and non-3D, and although language makes it seem like we are discussing two things,, really it is one thing – the All-D – with two poles. It is important to remember this every so often so as not to slide into dualistic thinking: There is only one everything, and so there are no absolute fault-lines. The world is never this or that, it is always this and that, and they are always in creative tension. As a rule of thumb, whenever you come to what seems like an either/or, you can find the underlying connection between the two at a higher or deeper level.  The world does not have fault-lines; it cannot be cracked into pieces.

The non-3D has its nature, the 3D a different nature. We as humans and non-humans and ex-humans respond to those differences, necessarily. As we have always said, the difference between those who are in 3D and those in non-3D is primarily the difference in the turf they live in.

The 3D, compared to the non-3D, is a compressed, slowed-down form of consciousness. In 3D, you experience one thing at a time. You are in one place, one time, and you cannot move yourself except by 3D rules. Your body can never more forward in time nor backward in time. It cannot traverse space except by going through whatever space lies between beginning and end points. That is the nature of 3D reality, constriction to one moment of space-time. There is no way around that.

Mentally, however, you may roam at will. You may imagine tomorrow or yesterday, may project your consciousness to ancient Atlantis or the surface of Mars or Abraham Lincoln’s Illinois. This is because the mind functions in non-3D, therefore by non-3D rules.

The various brains in the body function as transducers, or you may wish to think of them as radio sets, receiving non-3D signals and transmitting to 3D, or vice-versa.

So, to provide a rough-and-ready snapshot of the situation, we may say the body lives in 3D by 3D rules, the mind lives in non-3D by non-3D rules – and therefore you live in both 3D and non-3D alike, recognize it or not.

Right-brain/left-brain theory gets a glimpse of this by seeing that one half of the brain centers on obtaining (producing) holistic views (gestalts), and the other half centers on processing data in detail, sequentially. This is only an illustration, but if not carried too far it will clarify the point.

Thus you have the equipment necessary to experience 3D (through the senses) and non-3D (through intuition). Or really, we should say you have the equipment necessary to realize that you already experience 3D and non-3D, both, and always have. You may not have conceptualized your experience that way, but surely it is clear once pointed out.

Once you realize that you live, and always have lived, in non-3D as well as 3D, you see that every interpretation of the world that failed to recognize this fact is incomplete, often useless and occasionally harmful. This isn’t the “fault” of those who proposed those interpretations. People do the best they can, and nobody gets anything exactly right. But once you see that a given picture is incomplete, you are free from any impulse you may have had to consider it The Truth. It may have a part of the picture, but it will have defects. At best, a distorting mirror. At worst, a compilation of irrefutable logic built upon false premises.

From this point, other questions arise, such as, “What’s the point of life in such circumstances?” We will argue that 3D life is important in ways that may not be obvious; also, that in the nature of things, the life that ends when the body dies (hence no longer holding the animating spirit to 3D conditions) acquires, or let’s say resumes, a different nature when freed from the drag of 3D conditions.

But first we probably ought to explain life in non-3D in connection with freedom from 3D constrictions. The continued existence of each moment is an important concept. Next time.

About 55 minutes. I’d swear you were college professors. Our thanks.

 

2. Is it practical?

Sunday, April 28, 2024

6:15 a.m. So, is it practical to ask how the world works? In effect, why we are here?

In what way would it be considered practical not to ask what it all means? Plenty of people live their lives without considering the question, or, if they do consider it, they quickly assume the answer can’t be known and don’t pursue the question. They get along just fine. Or, people don’t consider the question because they don’t realize there is any question: Their surroundings give them an answer and they do not question it.  How they are raised is how they remain.

For any of these people, the question does not arise, so pursuing it is not an issue. But if a great question-mark does fill your horizon, would it be practical to assume that it is there for no reason? If it matters to you, it is likely to matter a lot. Doesn’t it make sense to assume that something that you feel matters, does matter, even if you don’t immediately know why?

And of course there is a third, intermediate, position. It comes to matter or ceases to matter. This intermediate position is a variable state, and is the state these sessions my help.

So, three possible conditions:

  • It matters to you, and you are going to pursue it if possible.
  • You begin your life concerned with other things, but your life brings the question into focus. Or, you begin by questioning and leave off when you can’t find a way to satisfactorily answers.
  • It doesn’t matter to you. You consider it a dead issue, or a settled one, or one that never arises.

Those in the third position have no need of answers, and even if you could rouse them to an awareness of the importance of knowing why you are living, to unsettle them might do more harm than good, like the African “mission boys” of the colonial era, who were widely considered to be worth little either to their own people or to the conquerors’ society. A merely intellectual conversion may leave a severely divided person, not really able to cope or to fit in.

(Bear in mind, that doesn’t mean this is a detour for that individual soul. You can’t know the ultimate effects of any life experience, if only because there is not final “ultimate.” So we don’t say don’t disturb people in this position, we say merely that they aren’t the ones who will profit from a new way of seeing things.)

When we say “practical,” we are confining our field of inquiry to this life, this time, not some theoretical other life. To look at anything beyond the life you live now would be to sneak an answer into the question, like people trying to prove by logic that God does or does not exist. We’d rather not do that.

If the question matters to you, it matters for a reason, and we would say it ought to be pursued, just as you would pursue anything else in your life that mattered to you. To you.  That’s the beginning point. Does the question matter to you? If it did not, why would you bother about it? But if it does matter, how could it be considered practical to not pursue a question that poses itself to you whether or not you want it to? We regard it as a basic ground-rule: If it matters to you, take it seriously. Don’t pretend it doesn’t matter, just because you may not see immediately how to pursue the question.

For, this is the other half of the question about practicality: Can you pursue the question effectively? Can you really know anything if you put in the time and effort? And we’d say the answer is yes, but the process and result are not what you would probably expect. You won’t come to logical proof. You won’t stack evidence higher and higher until you are forced to a conclusion. You won’t discover a mathematics that proves anything. This isn’t that kind of question.

So then, what can you expect?

We’ll tell you. You will find yourself knowing more by a process of recognition than of logic or compiling data, certainly not by being persuaded by appeal to authority.

You already know. We are here merely to clarify what you know and don’t necessarily recognize that you know.

Does that sound circular? In terms of logic, no doubt it does. But in practice, not only does it work, but it is the only process that does work. You don’t get persuaded; you don’t grab some belief arbitrarily; you don’t throw up your hands and say, “It can’t be known.” In practice, what happens is that you recognize the truth, and the only learning that takes place is the association of ideas and conclusions and limitations and relationships that may not have occurred to you in the absence of conscious recognition.

We say this is the only learning that takes place. True, but that’s a big “only.”

We will point you to the truth, and then it is up to you. As we said earlier, everyone’s truth is going to be different, with overlaps. This is not about creating a movement, still less about creating a religion. It is about saving you time and energy in orienting yourself.

Here is an implication that some will shy from: Everyone’s particular subset of the truth is important. Everyone’s particular nuanced result fills an ecological niche that otherwise cannot be filled. Do not undervalue your participation in the great task. Do not hesitate to set your own understanding against that of the entire world. How else is any refinement of understanding ever accomplished? And how do you know but that your individual piece – which by nature must be unique – may be the very piece needed by another? You may consider this to be one meaning of Jesus saying that the discarded or disregarded stone becomes the keystone that holds up the arch. Do not assume there is only one discarded stone per universe. It happens all the time. You might take a careful look at your own stone, as it reveals itself.

And this will do for the moment.

And next time? Can you give us a headline?

Don’t press. Take it as it comes. As Seth says, it will be in perfect order. And if you nevertheless wish to reorder what comes, who is to stop you?

Okay. Our thanks as always.

 

1. Can we know?

Saturday, April 27, 2024

5:05 a.m. Mt friends, I have decided that if we resume our regular chats, I want us to work on the summary book together. I will do my best to steer it by questions – and I will hope that others will contribute questions as well – only this time we will work on explicit ground rules (which, of course, may change as things develop). This time we’re going to produce entries for the blog and for email lists, but with the understanding that I may change things extensively when it comes time to produce extended discourse. That is, I may rewrite.

It was never our intent that you reproduce us as if being a scribe and an acolyte or even a translator. We told you that repeatedly.

You did. But doing it my way left a record – a more or less verbatim record – documenting the process. From here we will concentrate on a clearer exposition. I consider that if this process hasn’t been demonstrated on the record by now, there is nothing more we can do by way of demonstration.

Well, we never fought you on the idea, merely reminded you that the restriction was on your end, not on ours.

True. So, to work? Let us address ourselves to the eventual reader. That will reduce the burden of rephrasing when it comes to putting it together.

So, first question: What is the practical use of changing our view of the way the world works? Life has plenty of obvious and serious problems. Why divert ourselves by trying to know what can’t be known?

If it couldn’t be known, there would be force in the question. It’s true, “Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal.” [Longfellow] But consider.

  • Is it true that “the way the world works” can’t be known?
  • Is it true that, if it can be known, the question is not practical?

We would say that the answer to the first question depends entirely upon one’s definitions of “known.” It can be known, enough to be of use, as we will show. And the second question is an easy, “Yes it is practical to ask.” And we will give our reasons why it is practical.

As to knowing the meaning of life – which is the same question, really, as knowing how the world works:

What do you mean by “knowing”? The same word may mean different things. There is the knowing that can be established by scientific instrumentation, testing a hypothesis to see if it can be falsified. Clearly this kind of knowing is not what we mean.

On the other end of the scale is the knowing that relies entirely on “what feels right.” This strictly intuitive approach is legitimate, but it has its pitfalls and its limits. We can’t rely on individual intuition to provide us with the answers to the meaning of life, to the way the world functions. Because it is individual, it is subject to psychological vagaries that not only may send you off the track, but in any case may make it terribly hard to communicate with your fellows. What is true for one may provide sure guidance in life for that one. Yet what is true for one may not be at all true for another.

The most productive approach to investigation lies between these two extremes, or is an alternation between them, or uses one to correct the other. This may seem a very insecure platform to rely on, but perhaps it is more reliable than it seems at first sight.

The first rule of investigation is to measure by the tools proper to the matter being examined. You don’t do psychological testing to see if a given geological area was the product of certain physical phenomena. Similarly, you don’t measure weight, density, etc. to see if human life has purpose. The right tool for the right job.

It isn’t like the questions haven’t been asked over the years. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? What should we do with our lives?

  • Some ask these questions relying heavily upon logic and thought, using other people’s previous answers as data, but subjecting everything to the test of logic. You call such inquiries philosophy.
  • Some ask as the result of personal experience (painful or ecstatic) or strictly out of a burning curiosity, and their investigation relies heavily upon other people’s testimony about their own experiences. This is the part of religion that attempts to trace what reality is, not the part that attempts to deduce or transmit what this implies (or commands) about human conduct. You call this theology.
  • An intermediate discipline attempts to come at the truth by taking personal testimony seriously – as evidence of the human mind’s functioning, not necessarily as evidence that what that mind concludes is correct. It also applies thought and logic to that data, and you call it psychology.

There are other approaches as well, but they are all variants of the two extremes, science and religion, and the intermediate position of psychology.

Using these methods of inquiry, yes, the world can be known. Human life can be understood. Only, bear in mind, true understanding will not produce only one answer.

This may seem contradictory: How can there be more than one truth?  But in fact, truth has so many facets that it can never be known in full. It can only be known from a given viewpoint. Every different viewpoint will show truth in a somewhat different perspective.

Perspective – the necessary result of viewpoint – produces different partial views, none of them necessarily “wrong,” or even “incomplete” or “misleading” – provided that you remember that they are partial views, not one (impossible) comprehensible 360-degree view. Try to imagine a view that sees not only 360 degrees around the horizon, but also every 360-degree view that can be drawn through every degree of altitude from the horizon to the zenith. It can’t be done. The only way to get to such a comprehensive view is to leave 3D limitations and move to a non-linear – non-3D – framework. But this you cannot do while still in the body. You may be able to conceive of it, you will be unable to accomplish it, any more than a rifleman could shoot in all directions at once.

But just because you cannot get a universal view beyond viewpoint, doesn’t mean you can’t get all you need, because (as we will show in its proper place) you represent a viewpoint. You are one bit of data out of the entirety. Just as you are not everybody, so your viewpoint cannot be everybody’s, and this is as it should be. But the one bit is valuable, and if you will think holistically, you will understand that every bit contains the whole.

Next time we will show why it is practical to ask these larger questions.

This seems to have worked well. Thanks.

 

God’s spies

Friday, April 26, 2024

Every time I write the date in an entry – or, not every time, but often enough – I am reminded of the months I spent wondering if the final entry would be any time soon. It seemed it must be – but never was. Well, someday.

Okay, guys, ready if you are. It is 4:35 a.m. (rounded as usual) and I have my very welcome coffee.

Consider your pleasure in writing in your accustomed journal book rather than the off-format one you endured for three months, and remember your thought about the philosophers.

Yes, I get it. I thought, yesterday, reading about Colin’s thought and life, that so many schools of philosophy were built upon totally inadequate models of human life. Incomplete, actually wrong, clearly demonstrated in  years since how incomplete and wrong they were, and yet their influence persists. Tabula rasa, for instance. Clearly wrong. Sartre and so many existentialist thinkers making assumptions and perhaps not even seeing that they were assumptions rather than facts, and so concluding that man is a useless passion, that life is inherently meaningless, that everything is contingent. And the link you are making is, I think, an example of how many connections we make that have nothing to do with logic or thought. In this case, the physical familiarity of the journal book and pen, the pjs and robe, the early morning coffee and the surrounding world’s quiet, with perhaps the distant sound of cars or trucks on the highways outside. Such physical clues are missed, just as are more debatable ones as heredity, affinity, past-life memory, etc.

The reason we wanted you to write the book interpreting our words is that no one else will be able to do the job you could do. Others will be able to do what you cannot do, but they won’t be able to do what only the one on the inside of the process can do.

Maybe I already did it in The Cosmic Internet.

To a degree, you did. But you know more now than you did then.

Well, I don’t know what to do about it. It’s like “The Stone and the Stream” manuscript that I looked at yesterday, for the first time since ceasing work on it in October. I can see that it won’t do; there isn’t any point in finishing it. But I can’t see how to go ahead with a new version, nor how to fix what I have. We may have to settle for what is done.

We aren’t the ones concerned about it.

No, but you are the ones quietly nudging me, I think. Or maybe not, maybe the distinction was never more than relative. In any case, I enjoy the feeling of being back in contact with you. I had reconciled myself to having finished all this, but I prefer it. And I bought a six-pack of these journals, as a sort of act of faith,. I hope they get filled with substance.

If I had the energy and the reason to do it, maybe I’d write a sort of autobiography. Colin thought I should, and that was before Rita and I even began our 2001 sessions.

As usual, it is your choice.

Let’s talk about something. I know it’s my choice, theoretically, but maybe it will get done or, more likely, maybe it won’t.

Consider your drawings.

I have gotten a good deal of pleasure out of the process of drawing in pencil, then later coloring the drawings with colored pencils. I have done hundreds of black-and-white sketches, and have colored a small proportion of them. I just framed and displayed nine of them on my dining room wall, as you know. Satisfying, fun, effortless in the sense of hard work, yet not effortless in the sense of time and attention spent doing them. None of this can come to anything except for myself. Maybe journaling is no different, despite that background sense that says, “This ought to be made available.”

Maybe it isn’t an either/or. Maybe things done for their own sake are accomplished regardless whether anything further is done with them. [They meant, I think, are an accomplishment either way.]

Like Charles absorbing 50 years’ worth of philosophical and religious reading, or my reading of so much history and biography.

The mental association is work; it results in a product within the mind you are, regardless if it is ever put into the world in overt form. We said this long ago. No one’s life – communicated to others or not – is “wasted.” No one’s connections are ephemeral. It is hard for people to realize that: It is one thing we still hope you will work at getting across to them.

Something of a contradiction there. It isn’t important that such things be communicated, and then it is.

You can untangle that yourself. It isn’t very complicated, and isn’t much of a contradiction.

I see that. You’re saying all our lives are important records of experience and connection (besides what else they are), and so whether we communicate to others isn’t important. But you are also saying it can be important to tell people this so they know.

One thing you came to do is to encourage people. What more encouraging for them than to be reminded that their inner world is not “inconsequential unless expressed.” And this ties in to your earlier thought about the failed philosophers.

Yes, it does. They judged us as if we were merely disconnected individuals, no Upstairs (non-3D) component at all, no psychic links and transmission, no purpose, not even any innate wisdom or radar. A totally inadequate model of what we really are, and we suffer from accepting that model to some extent except when we happen to wake up to its falsity.

If the inarticulate private citizen once realized that every mind registers, think what a heightened sense of responsibility and purpose and hopeful construction may result. “Mute, inglorious Miltons” may be seen as not having been wasted at all; they are closer to being God’s spies.

“God’s spies.” From Lear, I think. I have had that thought over the years. Most of us do not have access to the media megaphone, whether we would or would not want it. We live our lives as private things. We report (silently) on the world as it is beyond the media spotlight.

All paths are good, the life lived in the spotlight, the life lived in deliberate or inadvertent obscurity, the life mostly private and a little bit public, the life public but still unavoidable private. There is no preferred mode, as far as we are concerned, and no mode that is unfortunate. The more that people realize this, the happier and the more satisfied they will be.

I was thinking, the other day, I’ll bet every concept you’ve given us over the past 25 years can be found in my earlier journals. Many of them, anyway. It is as if I already knew it, but needed someone sort of external to call my attention to it.

“Sort of”? We are external to the degree that anything can be external, and internal in that we are all part of the one thing that is. And if your readers will remember this, they will see why it is impossible that they be disconnected or unimportant or disregarded, regardless of external circumstances or appearances; regardless even of how it feels to them.

We are going to have to find a way to bring the insights of religion back into our lives without at the same time carrying the rules and superstitions that accreted to the insight, to the mind-awareness, to the stance more in the All-D and less in 3D-only.

And that’s enough.

Fifty minutes, not bad. I’d say you earned your money today.

And we’d say you earned your coffee.

Which is cold, the little that’s left of it. Our thanks as usual.

 

Braiding (5) A word from the guys

While writing Muddy Tracks, I asked the guys upstairs if they would indicate the inner meaning of the events of 1970, and this is what they said:

Of course. And welcome to you, reader. What Frank calls The Gentlemen Upstairs, at your service. Perhaps he will not mind if we cast some of this in the third person. It will be easier for him to hear, and easier therefore to slip it through his mental filtration.

Frank was functioning exclusively Downstairs, as he calls it, all the years from the time he was shut down at about age seven until he gradually learned to consciously reopen the tap as a middle-aged man. The point of these early sections is to remind him—and you—of what it is like to live continuously Downstairs, without conscious access to other levels of your being. It isn’t “wrong” to do so, in any moral sense. It isn’t even “incorrect” to do so, for all paths are good, and all lead to growth one way or another. But while it isn’t wrong, and isn’t incorrect, it certainly is doing things the hard way. People do things the hard way sometimes because they are stubborn, and sometimes because they feel they have no choice. But usually they stop doing it the hard way when they learn that there is an easier way.

One purpose of this book is to convince you to try the easier way.

When Frank’s friend died, and in a way even more so when his earlier “friends”—his heroes—were killed, he had to deal with it exclusively from his Downstairs resources, and not even all of those. Because he thought he shouldn’t fear death, or mourn it, he convinced himself that it shouldn’t hurt, and that therefore it didn’t. Unable to acknowledge his feelings, he was of course unable to process them, and they remained violently alive within him. (So it seems to you in bodies, anyway.) Repressing awareness of feelings takes enormous amounts of energy, even when much of the emotion becomes locked into the physical structure. The violent unacknowledged feelings sloshing around inside made him prone to violent, unpredictable, uncontrolled mood swings, as those who were around him then could well testify. And the situation divorced him increasingly from the world around him, as he tried to cope with the world—with others—strictly from unacknowledged, therefore unknown, feelings. People were already a puzzle to him; they became even more so. He had no feel for who they were, or why they were as they were. He couldn’t understand the simplest things about what motivated them. And he had no idea how he appeared to others. Some were attracted to him, some were contemptuous, some puzzled. In no case did he have any idea why.

What all this has to do with Colin Wilson jumps the gun a bit, chronologically. Frank’s helplessness in the face of his friend’s death appalled him—though he scarcely realized it. And his dissatisfaction with his own life was so acute, his belief in the reality of any realistic path so nonexistent, that he was feeling trapped. He thought in terms of writing books, making lots of money, and living an independent existence not requiring him to go to work five days a week, but to his puzzlement he made little attempt to do the writing that would lead to the goal. He thought in terms of running for Congress in 1974, but made no attempt to lay any groundwork for the plan. He was stranded. At a deeper level, he was purposeless. (We speak here strictly of the Downstairs level that he experienced.)

Colin Wilson’s books gave him an opening he could believe in: the development of mental powers! The achievement of supernatural abilities, paranormal skills! He didn’t know whether he could believe in them or not, but here was a writer who was investigating reports of such things, and doing so from a point of view quite similar to his own: open and inquiring, yet skeptical and wanting to make sense of it all, rather than merely accepting someone’s word for it.

Wilson’s book came into Frank’s life—something he is about to learn as we bring him to write this—at just the time needed to provide him a bridge across despair. The Catholic Church had failed him, or so he would have put it, in that its rules and its perceived completeness and rigidity left no room for things he somehow knew were not as they had been described. (He called that knowing intuition then, not yet thinking in terms of layers of being.) The materialist worldview had no appeal; he similarly knew that was even less true than what he took the Catholic Church’s position to be. He was looking for a way out of his logical prison that said, “There is no God; or anyway, not as I have been taught; yet we are more than the accidental collection of chemicals.”

Wilson was there, to lead him to many others. The Mind Parasites inflamed him with the nonrational certainty that mental powers were there waiting to be developed. The Outsider and the succeeding books in Wilson’s Outsider cycle were crammed with references to others who seemed to see the world, if not just as Frank saw it, at least closer than anyone he knew in the flesh.

 

The guys on reacting to the news

[This stems from a comment made on the Voyagers Mailing List.]

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

[First day of spring. Also the day Rita Warren died in 2008.]

9:25 a.m. Okay, guys, you said that reacting to life in any way but living in faith would be “the equivalent of pretending to affect world affairs by your reaction to the latest news.” Care to elaborate, and clarify? Don’t we affect the world by our reactions to thing, even distant things? The analogy is to prayer.

This is partly a linguistic tangle, as you suggested to your friend in the mailing group, but more, it is a misunderstanding of our intent. We might have expressed ourselves more clearly, and here is an opportunity to do so.

There is a difference between intent and reaction, between conscious decision and the playing-out of old tapes. And this is the key to many things.

How does one watch the TV news, or read the newspaper, or surf the news websites? For that matter, how does one relate to others in oral or written conversations centering on the news? How, makes a difference, because what seem to be the same thing may prove to be very different in nature and in effect.

Bullets?

Perhaps, or a numbered list, better.

  1. Impartial interest. You want to know what’s going on, just to know.
  2. Partisan interest. You feel that you have a stake in the outcome (not of course necessarily any material stake, but an interest, a commitment). You take sides.
  3. Outraged interest. You ascribe right and wrong, and root for the right and detest the wrong. This in turn subdivides into:
    1. Historical
    2. Ideological
    3. Emotional
    4. (Call it) logical connection

So, 1 is perhaps well grounded in facts, or perhaps not, but in effect you are sure you know what happened to bring this about.

2 is more the way a committed Communist intellectual would have parsed a situation through “dialectical materialism” or whatever. Events can only be seen through a consciously adopted filter (which may have become so automatic as to function invisibly.)

3 always roots for the underdog, or instinctively sees disturbances as threats to civilization, or in any way plays off of prejudice that is seen as analysis.

It is a little more complicated with 4. This is a sort of combination of the first three, or rather of some elements of each of the first three. It says, “This probably connects to that, and my reaction to that is already set, so that governs (shapes) my reaction to that.” It is a form of analysis, but one far from being as coldly logical as the thinker supposes.

That’s all on one side of the ledge. The other side is one’s intent.

That isn’t clear. I thought what you just listed was intent.

Hmm. We see that. Let us have a moment to process. The exposition is new to us, not only to you.

Hard to see how that can be, but okay. We’ll wait.

[Brief pause]

Let’s back up and start again from another angle.

The power to bless is the power to curse, as you know. Similarly, the power to heal is the power to harm. This is one reason why it may be considered a safety-valve that most people are not powerful healers. It is one of those abilities that is well served by being kept out of the hands of the ill-intentioned or even the careless. As people’s emotional maturity increases, as they learn to live in love in bad times as well as good, the ability may be safely spread more broadly.

Now, what is a person’s reaction to the news, if an emotional one, but intent to aid one side and harm another? Not consciously, perhaps, but it is much like rooting for one team over another, only with elevated stakes.

Well, if you hear that the X conflict has flared up again, your reaction may be tempered by many things. You may distrust the news you get; you may read more into what you hear, for good or bad reasons. You may accept what is given as fact. In any case, your emotional reaction may be rage or exultation or anything between. Or, you may be indifferent, or merely interested but no more.

Can you see that this is a relationship with variables at either end? On the one side, the information, on the other side, your reaction. (And we have not mentioned, nor do we want to consider here, how your reaction interacts with other factors in your life.)

All this is to say something pretty simple. Your reaction cannot directly affect what happened. Your sincerest wish could not get Kennedy un-killed. No partisan could by intent cause any event to un-happen. (We are not talking here about alternate time-lines. That is a different subject that would only add confusion in this context.)

But what your reaction can do, and does do – you might say must do – is add to the emotion on one or the other side of this ledger: bright or dark, love or fear, hope or despair. This is the effect you have, and it is not trivial.

So when we referred to people pretending to affect world affairs by their reaction to the news, we did not mean to say, “What you experience makes no difference,” nor “You and your reaction are trivial.” Rather we meant, there is a difference between what you think you are doing and what you are doing. You may think you are affecting one side of a conflict by cursing it. What you are doing is adding to the total of hatred and fear and darkness.

You see? You do not affect the situation itself, you affect the aura surrounding it.

That’s pretty clumsy. I think you mean, the 3D features of the situation are not affected: We can’t make a rocket miss its target, nor undo damage that has already been done, but we can affect the non-3D aspects by adding our efforts to whatever tug-of-war is going on.

That is an acceptable rephrasing. The argument is full of logical holes that we can’t fill. For instance, non-3D efforts certainly affect 3D conditions all the time. But what is important here is not making a complete and accurate statement – which is beyond us here – but providing a finger pointing to the moon.

This has been an interesting exercise. It feels like you were struggling. Is this because my own mental world didn’t provide you ruts to run in?

Partially. Any new way of seeing things presents difficulties. But partly it is a matter of us having to organize connections on the fly. We remind you, you have experienced this in the past.

Not very often, though. Mostly you have your scripts prepared plus you are pretty good at ad libbing. In any case, thanks as always. I suspect we will have to revisit the subject, and that if and when we do, it will flow more smoothly.

Well, we’ll see, won’t we?

Indeed we will.

 

The guys, on living the present

Monday, March 18, 2024

8 a.m. You boys seem to enjoy putting the cat among the pigeons, and every time you do, it seems some people profit by it. So, anything on your minds today? How about continuing from where we left off?

Perhaps it is worth saying on your behalf that we do not experience your questions or comments as stemming from discouragement or desperation, but from curiosity and often perplexity.

I have often said as much to various friends but for some reason it seems to come across as an emotion I am not feeling – much like when people sometimes experience you as chastising me when we are only joking or when it is an even, straight, exchange. But given the limitations on using words, I don’t know what can be done about it. Nothing, I imagine, and so what?

Well, there is a line to be walked. OT1H you don’t want to give up on the idea of conveying a sense of atmosphere; OTOH, just realize that precision is not to be had outside of telepathic contact, and even there the “flavor” of the minds  involved will flavor the soup.

I’m not worried about it if you aren’t. It just seemed something to be mentioned.

A mention, yes, not a full-length disquisition, unless for some reason that becomes warranted.

So – more on why we’re still here, or on vertical community?

Let us return – continually return – to the practical. Any theory or even any description of the way things are that we may engage in is always aimed at practical use. We don’t want you (plural) building castles in the air unless, like Thoreau, you intend to put the foundations under them. So everything we have given you in 25 years has been intended to help orient you to the way things are, so that you may better live your potential. Not so you may admire an abstract scheme, but so that you may use the scaffolding to get a bird’s-eye view, the better to work from.

If you are not in 3D to live, what are you there for? But of course, the question is, what does “live” mean for you, in this moment?

I hear you saying, All paths are good: scholar, adventurer, soldier, idler, whatever. The externals of our life aren’t what you are concentrating on.

No. you will each shape your life by a combination of the existing possibilities (predestination) and what you do with them (free will). But from our point of view, your internal life is what is real.

That didn’t come out right, did it?

It was hastily put, let’s put it that way. Your internal life and your external life are, of course, part of one life. Either may be considered in the absence of the other, but it is only a partial view.

Bullets?

Perhaps. Let’s see.

  • The internal world is your life as experienced intuitively.
  • The external, as experienced via the physical senses.
  • In effect, right-brain internal, left-brain external, and they are designed to complement each other.
  • Thus (this will be obvious to some, and we have said it many times), inner and outer worlds are not different, nor disconnected, much less one real and the other not. They are one reality, experienced in alternative ways.
  • This identity being so, which way of looking at life should be considered more profound? You will have a preference; the answer may seem obvious. But in fact, it is dealer’s choice and depends upon your psychic composition.
  • We, based in non-3D, naturally see the intuitive, gestalt, non-sensory perception as realer, more reliable, than the sensory, detail-oriented, sequential view that is channeled through physical senses.
  • But again, it isn’t that simple. (You could print that out and hang it on the wall: “It isn’t that simple.” It never is. Anything can always be explored more deeply.) Your view of the external world is inextricably mixed with your thoughts, emotions, complexes, etc. Your experience of the inner world is highly variable depending upon your physical circumstances such as fatigue, disorientation, etc.

That seemed to go well.

Yes, good suggestion. Now, the question remains for you, for anybody: What are you doing with your life right now? What you did yesterday, what you might do tomorrow, may be interesting, but they are not centered in the way anything is centered that deals with here, now, because that is what is real in terms of –

Yes, I was wondering how you were going to finish that sentence.

Well, it’s the usual problem with words, less “How do I say it so as to be understood” than “How do it say it so as to lessen the chances of being mis-understood?” That’s why we’re always circling around a subject, to sketch enough context to hopefully orient the reader to look in the right direction.

Bullets again?

Maybe not. Let’s put it this way: Your entire life, past, present, and future, is theoretically available and interacting with you at any moment. This is true, if counter-intuitive. But it is also true that your only moment of application is in whatever “now” you find yourself. You can choose now, no time else. The confusing thing is that every moment is experienced as now when you are in it; still, your awareness is in one “now” no matter how wide a net you cast.

Yes, I have been aware for some time that we need some bridging concept to make clear to us how it can always be “now” and yet each other moment of our lives have its own “now.”

We doubt if it can be contained within 3D awareness. You can grok it, perhaps. We doubt you can establish it as a law of nature. (However, we could be wrong.)

Hold this in mind. Different angles of vision from the same place produce different vistas. That is a function of vision and perspective, not of some contradiction in reality or some flaw of observation.

So, looking one way, we say every moment of time is as if separate, just as you in each of those moments are as if different from what you are in other moments. Looking another way, we say nothing passes, least of all time. There is only the one living moment, so therefore you – we – live only in that one living “now.”

Put the two seemingly contradictory views together (you can intuit its truth, even if you can’t build a logical structure of it). You will see that’s your life. You in the present can learn to range backward and forward, but the only time you feel fully alive is when you are consciously in the living “now.” We said consciously in the living now, notice. You are always there (as there is nowhere else to be) but if you are distracted by daydreams and old tapes and robotic repetitions, you may not be living in the present in effect.

The present is life. Awareness is life. Choice, delight, pain, all the experiences of the 3D, are life. A greater non-3D awareness while you are still in the body is life.

What does any of this have to do with the externals of your life? Viktor Frankl had a hard life while in the concentration camp, but you can see by what he brought out of it that he lived. Can any of you say that your life is harder than his? And, if it were, would that necessarily be a bad thing? Maybe it would be life more intensely.

Interesting thought.

Hold this: The practical thing to do is always to live as awarely as you can. All the details will vary from one person’s life to the next, but the common factor will be, “You are living this life. Live it as you please, but live it.” And if you can live it in calm joy, so much the better.

Our thanks for all this, as always.